Thursday, February 10, 2005

Iran in the News

CNN.com | Rice: "Iran must halt nuclear program"U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Wednesday that Iran must live up to its international obligations to halt its nuclear program or the next steps are in the offing.""And I think everybody understands what the 'next steps' mean," Rice told reporters..

Reuters.com | Kay Warns U.S. Not to Repeat Iraq Mistakes in IranWASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. official who declared the White House's hunt for illicit weapons in Iraq to be a failure driven by faulty intelligence has warned the Bush administration against repeating its mistakes in the current war of words with arch-foe Iran.

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Rice: Iran must halt nuclear programSecretary of state says Iran could be referred to Security Council

BRUSSELS, Belgium (CNN) -- U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Wednesday that Iran must live up to its international obligations to halt its nuclear program or "the next steps are in the offing."

"And I think everybody understands what the 'next steps' mean," Rice told reporters after a meeting with NATO foreign ministers and European Union officials.

"It's obvious that if Iran cannot be brought to live up to its international obligations that, in fact, the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) statutes would suggest that Iran has to be referred to the U.N. Security Council," she said.

Iran has refused to halt its nuclear program, saying it is only intended for peaceful energy production.

In recent months, negotiators from France, Britain and Germany have been trying to coax Iran to fully disclose the parameters of its nuclear program and abandon efforts to produce nuclear fuel in exchange for economic and political incentives.

"The message is there, the Iranians need to get that message, and we can certainly always remind them that there are other steps that the international community has at its disposal should they not be prepared to live up to these obligations," the secretary of state said.

She said that no timetable had been set.

"We continue to be in completely close consultation with the Europeans about how it is going, about whether progress is being made, about whether the Iranians seem to be moving toward living up to those obligations, and we'll just monitor and continue those discussions," she said.

In his state of the union address last week, President Bush singled out Iran as "the world's primary state sponsor of terror -- pursuing nuclear weapons," while depriving its people of freedom.

The administration made similar statements and threats in the run-up to its invasion of Iraq.

But Rice on Friday said that the question of using military force against the Tehran regime "is simply not on the agenda at this point in time."'Time for diplomacy'

"We believe this is a time for diplomacy," the secretary said Wednesday, adding that human rights in Iran and Tehran's sponsoring of terror groups are also causes for concern.

"The message that we are giving to Iran: We do have diplomatic means at our disposal, we are doing this bilaterally as well as multilaterally, and I believe that a diplomatic solution is in our grasp, if we can have unity of purpose, unity of message with the Iranians and if the Iranians understand that the international community is quite serious about it living up to its obligations."

The IAEA has the authority to refer Iran to the Security Council, but the group's board of governors has refrained from doing so in seven meetings on the topic in the past two years.

Mark Gwozdecky, a spokesman for the IAEA, said the governors have reaffirmed their support for the inspection process at each meeting "as long as inspectors are making progress and not being obstructed, and as long as Iran appears to be cooperating."

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former U.S. chief weapons inspector David Kay urged the United States on Wednesday not to make the same mistakes with Iran that he said it made with Iraq ahead of the second Persian Gulf War.

Former President Jimmy Carter, meanwhile, said that even a pre-emptive strike against Iran's nuclear facilities "would not be successful," but he agreed with U.S. officials who have demanded more transparency from the Islamic republic.

In Belgium on Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Iran must live up to its international obligations to halt its nuclear program or "the next steps are in the offing."

"It's obvious that if Iran cannot be brought to live up to its international obligations that, in fact, the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] statutes would suggest that Iran has to be referred to the U.N. Security Council," she told reporters after meeting NATO foreign ministers and European Union officials.

"The message is there, the Iranians need to get that message, and we can certainly always remind them that there are other steps that the international community has at its disposal should they not be prepared to live up to these obligations," the secretary of state said. (Full story)

Kay told CNN he is worried because he's hearing some of the same signals about Iran and its nuclear program that were heard as the Bush administration made its case for the war in Iraq.

"It's deja vu all over again," Kay said. "You have the secretary of defense [Donald Rumsfeld] talking about the problems of a nuclear-armed Iran. You have the vice president [Dick Cheney] warning about a nuclear-armed Iran and terrorism; you have [Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice saying, 'Force is not on the agenda -- yet.' "

Kay said that much like what happened before the U.S.-invasion of Iraq in March 2003, most of the information concerning Iran's weapons program and capabilities is coming from dissidents who would like to see regime change.

As he put in a column in Monday's Washington Post, "There is an eerie similarity to the events preceding the Iraq war."

The Bush administration has also recently suggested that the matter of Iran's nuclear program be referred to the U.N. Security Council -- much as it demanded a resolution that Iraq give up its alleged weapons of mass destruction or face military action. Such weapons were never found in Iraq.

"It's amazing that we're talking about military action against Iran and we don't have a national intelligence estimate that shows what we do know, what we don't know and the basis for what we think we know," Kay told CNN.

Kay, who served as a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq in the first Gulf War and as the chief U.S. inspector in the second war, said he has no doubt that Iran does have nuclear ambitions.

"The IAEA has now produced damning proof that for 18 years they cheated on their nuclear obligations," he said.

"But that doesn't prove that they've taken the final step toward a nuclear weapons program. They clearly have done all the preliminary work. The challenge now is to find a diplomatic basis that will keep them from going that last mile."

Kay said the United States must try through diplomatic means to deal with Iran and shouldn't rush into military action.

"Let the failure be Iranian failure, not failure of American diplomacy," he said.

An Iran armed with nuclear weapons would be especially treacherous because of its ties to terrorism, Kay said.

"We're in a dangerous time right now," he said.Ex-president: Attack likely would fail

Carter told CNN Wednesday that the U.S. military was "bogged down in Iraq and overextended, in my opinion."

"I think diplomacy is a proper approach," he said, "And I believe that's exactly what President Bush is doing, as announced by Condoleezza Rice."

In last week's State of the Union address, Bush said the United States is working with European allies to convince Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions and "end its support for terror."

Iran insists its nuclear activities are legal and for peaceful purposes.

"Iran is a signatory of a [nuclear] nonproliferation treaty," Carter said. "Israel, for instance, is not. Iran still claims -- as backed up I think by the international commission on nuclear weapons -- that they are in compliance with the nonproliferation treaty.

"I don't know what the facts are, but I think that's going to be increasingly important for the world to ascertain," he said.

"And it may be that through the United Nations Security Council, the United States, the Europeans and others will continue to put increasing pressure on Iran ... to help reveal exactly what is the status of Iran's policies."

Carter pointed out that Iran does have a right, under the nonproliferation treaty, to develop a nuclear power program and to dispose properly of the program's waste.

"Whether they're doing it legally at this point, I don't know," said the former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

But Carter said that a pre-emptive strike against Iran -- such as Israel's 1981 attack taking out the Osirak facility in Iraq -- would have little chance of success because most Iranian nuclear facilities are now spread over a wide area and buried deep underground.

"It would just arouse the entire Middle East again in an antagonistic response against the United States," he said.

"And I'm not sure that we are prepared militarily now to take on another war."

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. official who declared the White House's hunt for illicit weapons in Iraq to be a failure driven by faulty intelligence has warned the Bush administration against repeating its mistakes in the current war of words with arch-foe Iran.

"There is an eerie similarity to the events preceding the Iraq war," David Kay, who led the search for banned weapons of mass destruction in postwar Iraq, said on Monday in an opinion piece in The Washington Post.

"Nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran would be a grave danger to the world. That is not what is in doubt," he wrote.

"What is in doubt is the ability (of) the U.S. government to honestly assess Iran's nuclear status and to craft a set of measures that will cope with that threat short of military action by the United States or Israel," Kay added.

President Bush justified the March 2003 invasion of Iraq by saying Saddam Hussein posed a threat because Baghdad had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was reviving its nuclear weapons program.

No such weapons were found. Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee a year ago that U.S. intelligence was "almost all wrong," and later urged reorganization of the U.S. intelligence services.

The U.S. government accuses Tehran of pursuing nuclear weapons under the guise of a civilian nuclear energy program, a charge Iran denies.

Remarks by top U.S. officials including Vice President Dick Cheney recently stirred concern of possible military action against Iran, which Bush has called the "world's primary state sponsor of terror." However, the administration, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, has since stressed diplomacy with in public comments.

"Now is the time to pause and recall what went wrong with the assessment of Iraq's WMD program and try to avoid repeating those mistakes in Iran," Kay said in the Post.

He suggested Washington accept that it cannot prevent Iran from possessing the scientific knowledge for developing a nuclear weapon.

"It is nonsense to talk about eliminating Iran's nuclear capabilities short of war and occupation," said Kay, who urged the administration to rely on U.N. weapons inspectors to uncover any future weapons violations.

"The goal ... is to craft a set of tools and transparency methods that so tie Iran's nuclear activities to the larger world of peaceful nuclear activities that any attempt to push ahead on the weapons front would be detectable."

Kay recommended that the administration safeguard the quality of its intelligence on Iran by involving respected outside experts in its assessment.

He also warned that the United States would only invite international derision by relying Iranian exiles for material to support its case, as it relied on Iraqi expatriates in 2003.

BANGKOK - As Iran and the European Union go into talks in Geneva Tuesday on Tehran's nuclear program, former U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said the possibility of the United States attacking the Middle Eastern country, at this juncture, seemed remote.

But he warned that if a U.S. military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities were to take place, Washington could face a huge Iranian nationalist backlash.

'' I think the restraining element in this must be that the United States must know if they launch an attack, there (possibly) could be (a nuclear) retaliation,'' said Blix.

''There is uncertainty. They (the U.S.) may not know that the Iranians might be hiding some (nuclear weapons) prototype somewhere. They (the Iranians) have the designs and they have the technology,'' he told journalists late Monday at the Foreign Correspondents Club, here, in a program organized by the Vienna-based International Peace Foundation.

''The public of Iran is divided with regard to the theocracy - a great many people in Iran are sick and tired of it and would like to see a liberalization of the regime,'' said Blix. ''But the moment the U.S. goes strong on them, there would be a patriotic attitude - there will be a nationalist backlash.''

Added Blix: ''There is already a considerable negative attitude towards the U.S. in the Middle East. This could make things worse.''

New U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Friday said that a military strike against Iran was ''simply not on the agenda at this point,'' but her boss President George W. Bush has not ruled out military strike as an option.

The EU, led in the talks by Britain, France and Germany, is calling on Iran to totally dismantle its nuclear fuel program but Iran insists that it has the right, in accordance with international treaties, to work on the nuclear fuel cycle.

Iran is currently suspending all uranium enrichment-related activities to fulfill its part of a deal clinched in November with the European trio, the so-called EU3, for talks aimed at giving the Islamic Republic trade, security and technology bonuses.

The meeting in Geneva will be the third round of talks since they began in December in Brussels.

Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), a country is allowed, under inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to enrich uranium to a level needed for nuclear power. Most however do not. They get fuel from others.

The key problem is that the same technology can also be used to enrich uranium further in order to make nuclear weapons.

Iran says that it needs to develop nuclear power despite its oil because it wants diversity. It also wants to enrich its own fuel because it says it cannot trust others.

''It's conceivable that the United States is sitting on the sidelines and leaving it to the Europeans to negotiate,'' said Blix.

''I think the Europeans have been on the right track and as I said I cannot guarantee that the Iranians are not just temporizing - there could be something building up. You have to be skeptical in this business,'' revealed the former weapons inspector.

According to Blix, there will be pressure from the Arab nations on Iran not to take the path of developing nuclear weapons.

''The Arab world does not want Iran to move on (in the nuclear weapons direction) because they know if Tehran does, the chances of Israel moving away from nuclear weapons will be much less. If the Iranians are moving on, for sure the Israelis will continue on their path,'' he stressed.

According to the Arab TV news network 'Al-Jazeera', Blix is ''the man the United States loves to hate''.

Even before he was appointed in 2000 to the task of verifying Iraq's compliance with disarmament promises made after the 1991 Gulf War, Washington was already plunging the knife into his candidacy.

U.S. hawks opposed his appointment saying his failure to turn up Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in his previous stint as head of the IAEA between 1981-1997 proved he had been outwitted by the Iraqis.

From then on the relationship has been frosty.

Blix stayed on as head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) till the end of June 2003.

''We have to keep our feet on the ground. Are WMDs the greatest threat to the world?'' asked Blix.

''We have nuclear threats which are less at this point in time than it used be to when the world had the doctrine of 'Mutually Assured Destruction' or MAD - where the United States and the former Soviet Union could have erased each other during the Cold War,'' he pointed out.

''If you ask someone in Africa, they would say the greatest threat to them is HIV/AIDS,'' he continued. ''If you ask me I'd say the threat to the global environment is more dangerous than the threat posed by WMDs.''